Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
But it looks like those bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life, and it could be having major effects on their company’s output.
Research by the London School of Economics and Protiviti found that friction in the workplace was causing a worrying productivity chasm between bosses and their employees, and it was by far the worst for Gen Z and Millennial workers.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of Millennials described themselves as unproductive.
From my experience, (I was born in 1995) in the jobs iv done (Restaurants, IT, Car detailing) most work places in today’s time most tasks are made to be repeated constantly.
The issue iv seen is the work places do not have the proper tools/resources to make the repeatable tasks efficient, or management just doesn’t care how efficient the repeatable tasks is, as long as it gets done. Even if it takes 2 hours longer then it needs to.
We the people do not benefit from the technology used by the higher ups in the same company. We are given fragments of it, and then told to “figure it out” or to “talk to your supervisor”, then have to go find the other people with the other fragments and peice them together to find the solution.
I think that’s a fair comment. I just got off a call with a vendor that has policies that don’t seem to be up to date. I asked them about them and the manager in question said she’ll ask her employees why they are doing something a certain way and it’s because a prior manager told them to do it that way 15 years ago. We used to call that tribal or anecdotal knowledge. It’s always an ineffective middle manager who can’t get out of their own way and “throws bodies” at a problem. I’m guessing if you get busy then your team gets burnt out. I’m not always convinced the higher ups are using technology well either.
Personally, I started a business that serves other companies. I’ve noticed that many potential clients want only a couple seat licenses for our software so they can keep the knowledge to themselves. I won’t sell these companies less than a dozen seats (small sales teams mostly) because I know the employee down the line needs the tool the most to be productive.